Re: [Help-smalltalk] GST on the JVM?

[Brad Watson]

Speaking for myself only, gst appeals to me precisely because it is c based: it 
provides a simple and elegant (IMHO) way for the reification of other disparate 
works.

The addition of compilers targeted for other VMs like the Strongtalk-VM, LVM, 
PortableNet, and JVM does sound interesting, however....

Brad Watson

----- Original Message ----
From: Paul D. Fernhout <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:04:40 PM
Subject: [Help-smalltalk] GST on the JVM?

I know there are some other Smalltalks for the JVM in various states of 
use and licensing (Bistro, Smalltalk/JVM, Talks2, SmallWorld, etc.)
   http://www.smalltalk.org/versions
   http://www.robert-tolksdorf.de/vmlanguages.html
but I was wondering, now that Sun has officially announced moving the JVM 
and Java SE to the GPL, if there would be any serious interest (especially 
at the GNU/FSF level) in having GNU Smalltalk on the JVM?

Of what I have seen of the other Smalltalk for the JVM, Bistro looks like 
maybe the best candidate (especially as it even includes language 
enhancements to work with Java types and having a free-seeming license), 
but I do not think that has an active user community or any recent work. 
So anyway, just wondering what people's opinions were on this.

In any case, it seemed like, respecting the license, that GNU Smalltalk 
could be a source of much good code for such a system and its image. I 
know right now GST is heavily tied to C etc., so no doubt there would be a 
bunch of work, perhaps best done along the lines of what Squeak does to 
generate the VM from translating Smalltalk-like code. In that sense, GST 
(or another Smalltalk) could then be used as is to develop and bootstrap a 
JVM version.

The main benefit I see of a JVM version is good cross-platform support 
without much work by the maintainer, plus an ability to draw from Java's 
libraries like for Swing widgets and Java3D. Also, it would help address 
GST's biggest weakness in the past IMHO which has always been difficulty 
getting it going in the first place from source on various non-Unix 
platforms (e.g. Windows, Mac). With a JVM version, people could (in 
theory) launch a GST application with one click in a web browser if they 
had Java Web Start enabled.

Anyway, just sounding out general interest here or whether it would be 
better to work with a different system if people don't see that a good 
direction for a GST variant and it was otherwise worth doing.

--Paul Fernhout


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